![Senior Jett Mckinney stores all the clothes in his own room, with half of it stored in his closet along with his personal clothes, and the rest taking up space in his room.
“There’s been times [when] there’s so much clothing stored here and it gets overwhelming, so I end up having to sleep somewhere else in the house,” Mckinney said.](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/DSC_0951-1200x800.jpg)
![Broadcast, yearbook and newspaper combined for 66 Interscholastic League Press Conference awards this year. Yearbook won 43, newspaper won 14 and broadcast took home nine. “I think [the ILPC awards] are a great way to give the kids some acknowledgement for all of their hard work,” newspaper and yearbook adviser Paige Hert said. “They typically spend the year covering everyone else’s big moments, so it’s really cool for them to be celebrated so many times and in so many different ways.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/edited-ILPC.jpg)
![Looking down at his racket, junior Hasun Nguyen hits the green tennis ball. Hasun has played tennis since he was 9 years old, and he is on the varsity team. "I feel like it’s not really appreciated in America as much, but [tennis] is a really competitive and mentally challenging sport,” Nguyen said. “I’m really level-headed and can keep my cool during a match, and that helps me play a bit better under pressure.” Photo by Kyra Cox](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/hasun.jpg)
![Bringing her arm over her head and taking a quick breath, junior Lauren Lucas swims the final laps of the 500 freestyle at the regionals swimming competition on date. Lucas broke the school’s 18-year-old record for the 500 freestyle at regionals and again at state with a time of 4:58.63. “I’d had my eye on that 500 record since my freshman year, so I was really excited to see if I could get it at regionals or districts,” Lucas said. “ State is always a really fun experience and medaling for the first time was really great. It was a very very tight race, [so] I was a bit surprised [that I medaled]. [There were] a lot of fast girls at the meet in general, [and] it was like a dogfight back and forth, back and forth.” Photo by Kaydence Wilkinson](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Kaydence-2.7-23-edit-2.jpg)
![As her hair blows in the wind, senior Brianna Grandow runs the varsity girls 5K at the cross country district meet last Thursday. Grandow finished fourth in the event and led the varsity girls to regionals with a third place placement as a team. “I’m very excited [to go to regionals],” Grandow said. “I’m excited to race in Corpus Christi, and we get to go to the beach, so that’s really awesome.” Photo by Addison Bruce](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/brianna.jpg)
Goose Against the World
FTC Robotics Team Wins State Championship
Posing with their first place medals, the FTC Robotics team takes a picture after winning gold at the UIL Robotics competition in March. The Robotics team qualified for Worlds, which will be held on April 18. “It was pretty good to win,” senior Austin Jia, who is president of the FTC team, said. “The competition for UIL state is a lot more lax than the normal robotics state, and it’s just lower stakes so it wasn’t that stressful, but it still felt nice to win.” (Photo Courtesy of the FTC Robotics team)
April 12, 2023
September of 2022 marked the beginning of Goose’s life in the FTC Robotics world. Goose the robot was built within eight weeks after the kickoff of their season in September and garnered its name because of its resemblance to the animal.
Goose carried the team to victory at the FTC 5A UIL State Championship on March 24 and qualified for Worlds, which will be held on April 18-22 in Houston at the George R Brown Convention Center. The FTC team spends a lot of time together and that contributed to the feeling of the win, according to senior and FTC president, Austin Jia.
“It was super cool,” Jia said. “Seeing others advance and great teams not advancing last year made it feel almost impossible. We all spent a lot of time together after school to make it possible, so progressing as a group is awesome.”
Jia has been committed to the robotics team since his freshman year.
“I just like the idea that you can build whatever you want, and nobody is telling you what to do,” Jia said. “If you have an idea, we have all the machines you would ever need to make it happen. So now, we’re just making sure that our robot is in peak condition and just practicing driving a lot, so we can do as good as we can.”
It felt good to win the UIL competition, according to Jia, but there were a lot of steps before getting to that point. Everything started after the kickoff of the season. The team began to plan out the model of the robot initially using drawings on napkins, according to Software Head John Matistic, and then transferred their ideas into a 3D model. Then the coding for the robot began on GitHub, essentially a google doc for code, which is shared between Jia and Matistic.
“I’ll do one day and then I’ll upload everything we did that day online so we can keep a copy online with separate copies of different kinds of experiments and things like that,” Matistic said. “[We code] the program, so how it moves or like how it moves on its own, or how it would know where it is. Things like that, like its brain.”
The next step of bringing the robot into fruition is gathering the money to put it together. The robotics team raised around $15,000 for this season, which is more than 10 times the $500 that was raised last year. The new booster club had a huge part in helping raise money, but Project Manager and senior Delaney Deruiter played a role in it as well.
“I overlook the entire team,” Deruiter said. “I make sure that everyone is on schedule, I plan all of the events, I schedule all of the meetings, I communicate with people not on the team like outreach committees, then I also communicate with people on the team. I have been working a lot with business this year. So, what that has entailed is a lot of fundraiser stuff. This year has been a big improvement in money and fundraising-wise, and that’s what I’ve been mostly doing.”
Once the team gathered the money to start building the robot, they got to work using a mix of 3D printed materials and materials bought with the money they raised. The first version of the robot is never the same as the last. Many changes have been made continuously over the season to help improve the robot. Any imperfections of the robot are sought out and improved, according to Matistic.
“For our claw where we grip the game pieces with, we used to use 3D printed material, then we put rubber bands on because we can have tension then they’ll grip easier since rubber bands are slightly sticky,” Matistic said. “Then we decided to custom mold silicone because silicone is really grippy. So we did that on our claw, and those three versions are what we’ve done. We do that for every part of our robot.”
The team is now preparing for the World robotics competition after school every Thursday. Jia remembers how satisfying the win felt and uses that to motivate him, as well as the rest of the team, for future competitions.
“It was pretty good to win,” Jia said “The competition for UIL state is a lot more lax than the normal robotics state, and it’s just lower stakes, so it wasn’t that stressful, but it still felt nice to win.”
![Holding a microphone, baseball booster club president Chris Cuevas announces the beginning of the annual cornhole tournament. The event has been held for the past two years and is designed to raise money for the baseball program in a fun way. “We’re a baseball team, so people love to compete,” Cuevas said. “So we figured we better do something that gets [their] attention. They want to compete. It’s not a hard sport to do, and we have all different [skill] levels [of participants].” Photo by Henry Mueller](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Henry-715-1200x900.jpg)
